Tony Snow On The Issues

ON BUSH’S ENERGY POLICY: “This year’s presidential clunkers included an energy policy filled with stuff that even Jimmy Carter abandoned…It is as if some huckster got the chief executive’s ear and told him about the can’t-miss investment of the future: cellulose fermentation. Impressed, the president wants everybody to invest. It’s like a chain letter, only compulsory.” [Townhall.com, 2/3/06]

ON BUSH’S MEDICARE AND EDUCATION POLICIES: “Bill, how does the president persuade conservatives in his own party that he’s one of them, given what we’ve seen with spending? You’ve seen Medicare, you’ve seen an education bill. These are things, I dare say, that if they’d been done under Bill Clinton, Republicans would have been howling.” [Fox News Sunday, 11/30/03]

ON RACIAL INEQUALITY: “Those eager to exploit differences between blacks and whites in America ignore the fact that the differences have all but vanished.” [Townhall, 1/20/06]

ON PROGRESSIVE TAXATION: “Furthermore, progressive taxation undermines the notion of shared citizenship”¦The federal law thus treats economic success the same way it treats embezzlement or murder — as a forbidden activity to be punished with increasingly harsh sanctions.” [Townhall.com, 3/2/01]

ON THE RULE OF LAW: “The president, in his responsibilities as commander in chief, sometimes has to do things that may or may not comport with the law“¦[T]he argument has always been that the constitutional obligation to serve as commander in chief sometimes pushes aside contemporary laws. [O’Reilly Factor, 1/20/06]

ON HIGH GAS PRICES: “Why is that per gallon crude oil price so high? Because people are jittery. You’ve got a guy in Iran saying we’re going to build a nuclear weapon. You’ve got people complaining about Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. There are jitters about the stability of the Middle East.” [O’Reilly Factor, 4/18/06]

ON THE VALERIE PLAME INVESTIGATION: “Now, it turns out that [special counsel] Peter (sic: Patrick) Fitzgerald doesn’t — can’t even identify any harm. She wasn’t a covert agent. She wasn’t compromised. As a result, what you’re doing is possibly sending a senior administration official off about a faulty memory over something that wasn’t a crime.” [O’Reilly Factor, 2/3/06]

ON RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVES: “Conservative columnist Tony Snow criticized [former Sen. Robert] Smith and other ‘Taliban Republicans’ for their rigid views. ‘The Taliban Republicans take a dark view of human nature,’ Snow wrote. ‘They consider the rest of us a bunch of potential dupes and regard society as a stew of corrupting influences.‘” [Church & State, 9/99]